I look for love in all the wrong places.

I found it first in the romance novels I devoured. From Pride and Prejudice to Twilight, I read them all within hours. Craving the charismatic love that each author spun into reality. Naturally, as most 15-year-old girls do, I looked for this type of love in my reality.

Tall and lanky, dorky in his faux Ray-Ban glasses with his obsession for the show Avatar the Last Airbender mirrored his intensity for me. I soaked up the attention, the sense of power he gave me, and it bored after a while. To be someone’s muse is exhausting when they’re not yours. I study up more, drowning myself in young adult fiction and I can’t fathom why life isn’t that simple.

Boy meets girl, they go on a date, they find out that they have common interests and boom its love. Or like Beauty and the Beast where you can grow to love that person because there’s more than just their looks that take your breath away. And that’s what love is, learning to love the depth of someone than the superficiality of what they can give you.

Then I found it. Being with him was like basking in the sun after a long winter, warm and full of light. He could turn any situation into my favorite snapshot in time. I had finally unearthed my muse and he buried me. Karma has a funny way of coming around and she doesn’t spare anyone. He left me hollow and in the shadow of a girl I could never be.

She was his sun, and I the moon. I thought that if by reflecting her light he’d find his way back to me. He hasn’t yet and a small part of me hopes he does but you can’t wait for someone to find you if they’re not looking. And I loathe myself for not being enough, for feeling like I could’ve given him more of me. What he and I had wasn’t love.

Yes, I adored him but he used me, to get over someone who looked at him the way he looked at me. There I realized I fear being alone. Plato’s theory of Symposium would somehow make me whole if I found my “other half."

But Plato was wrong. I ache to be complete more than I ever wanted to be in love and you don’t need someone else’s love to do it. You need yourself. Love isn’t everything and it doesn’t complete you, it compliments you and that’s where I’ve been going wrong, where these books have been misleading as well as past relationships. So stop looking and just being you, you’d be surprised that by embracing yourself, you’ll see that you don’t need anyone else, but to have someone that makes you better is where love is.